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BodyPunk
- GenresHorror
102 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2025
4 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Sam Richard
45 books109 followersSam Richard is the author of several books including The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God and the award-winning To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows. He has edited ten anthologies, including the cult hits Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery and The New Flesh, and his short fiction has appeared in over forty publications. Widowed in 2017, he slowly rots in Minneapolis where he runs Weirdpunk Books. You can stalk him @SammyTotep across most socials or at weirdpunkbooks.com
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 24, 2025
I received my copy of this book via the FilthyLoot Subscription Club. All views and opinions are my own.
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I've yet to attend a VoidCon myself (still plan to), but I have learned very quickly that when a book has it's genesis in a meeting of the minds at VoidcCon, then you sit up and pay attention. If Voidcon is the fertile, fermenting wetlands shrouded in shadow and full of haints, then the Void House is the seemingly abandoned structure along the shore, that is nightly alight with strange lights and whispers spoken in obscure tongues. BodyPunk, birthed from the depths of Voidcon, given its place of honor amongst the Void Collective.
Editor and Publisher of BodyPunk, Ira Rat has a brief, but excellent Introduction To Body Punk, both the book and the subgenre. It sets the tone for the book, and leaves the reader reconsidering other existing books and stories classified as Body Horror, or Splatter Punk, but that may indeed be BodyPunk.
This anthology brings together stories from Sam Richard, Joe Koch, Max Restaino and Charlene Elsby. Individually these writers are a credit to their craft, together they deliver a powerhouse of Weird Fiction. If the goal was to bridge the gap beween the Political nature of SplatterPunk and Body Horrors philosophical take, then I can only state that Body Punk is the throbbing pulsing mass that serves as the mortar which combing those two subgenres. If this is your first encounter with the works of any of these authors, consider this your invitation to dive down the rabbit hole.
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I've yet to attend a VoidCon myself (still plan to), but I have learned very quickly that when a book has it's genesis in a meeting of the minds at VoidcCon, then you sit up and pay attention. If Voidcon is the fertile, fermenting wetlands shrouded in shadow and full of haints, then the Void House is the seemingly abandoned structure along the shore, that is nightly alight with strange lights and whispers spoken in obscure tongues. BodyPunk, birthed from the depths of Voidcon, given its place of honor amongst the Void Collective.
Editor and Publisher of BodyPunk, Ira Rat has a brief, but excellent Introduction To Body Punk, both the book and the subgenre. It sets the tone for the book, and leaves the reader reconsidering other existing books and stories classified as Body Horror, or Splatter Punk, but that may indeed be BodyPunk.
This anthology brings together stories from Sam Richard, Joe Koch, Max Restaino and Charlene Elsby. Individually these writers are a credit to their craft, together they deliver a powerhouse of Weird Fiction. If the goal was to bridge the gap beween the Political nature of SplatterPunk and Body Horrors philosophical take, then I can only state that Body Punk is the throbbing pulsing mass that serves as the mortar which combing those two subgenres. If this is your first encounter with the works of any of these authors, consider this your invitation to dive down the rabbit hole.
October 16, 2025
One of the best anthos I’ve read from Filthyloot yet! Troubling, to say the least. Each story brings a unique feel — sometimes dreamy (or I suppose, nightmarish?), sometimes clinical, sometimes a little more aggressive. Wonderful all around.
Thanks for the copy, Filthyloot!
Thanks for the copy, Filthyloot!
November 7, 2025
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 8/10
TL;DR: A tight, grimy mixtape about flesh as philosophy and appetite as politics. If you want body horror that actually has ideas and still gets under your skin, this lands. If you’re chasing edge for edge’s sake, keep walking; this one wants your brain and your bile in the same bowl.
Filthy Loot’s BodyPunk comes preloaded with intent: an opening note draws a bright line between splatterpunk and “extreme,” arguing politics belongs to the former and philosophy to body horror. That frame sets expectations the book largely meets, with the lineup (Joe Koch, Max Restaino, Xavier Garcia, Charlene Elsby, Sam Richard) treating the body as thesis, experiment, and crime scene. It’s a volume that reads like a manifesto you can bleed on, and in the context of the press’s gnarlier catalog, it’s easily their most deliberate angle on embodied dread.
We’ve got five stories, five metastases. A young woman’s self-annihilating hunger meets a predatory intimacy in a restaurant bathroom (“And At Night, The Sirens”); a shut-in spirals through pain and perception (“Nothing Here”); desire and dissolution meet in crystalline vignettes; a post-op porn provocation dares you to confront gaze and gender; and a final cut stitches rage to ritual (“Endless Wound”). The common POV is a body on trial, and the stakes are identity versus appetite, control versus surrender, skin versus what leaks out.
What’s special here is how often the horror argues. Koch opens on a refrain – “It’s already happened. It’s happening again.” – that turns bulimia into ritual and seduction into metamorphosis, then detonates it with a bathroom encounter that is depraved, ecstatic, and strangely emancipatory. The scene’s sensory logic with bile as sacrament and spider-memory as origin myth makes the grotesque feel inevitable, not cheap. Later, Sam Richard’s closer weds pornography, geopolitics, and street-level nihilism, translating the splatterpunk claim that violence is political into cold, sticky imagery. Even when a piece aims to shock, it’s arguing about power.
Prose here swings from baroque to clipped. Koch’s sentences lilt and fever, stacking tactile verbs until the page feels wet; you can taste the porcelain and perfume. Restaino’s voice is intimate and migraine-bright, cutting boxes into a notebook while classic rock rots on the store speakers, then letting perception and space slide until you’re unsure which ache is real. Elsby’s contribution weaponizes bluntness and syntax, interrogating performance and post-op sexuality by refusing euphemism. Richard’s cadence is montage – loops of missiles, no-face men, ejaculate on film stock – like Godard found a snuff archive and started scoring it with helicopters. The variety never feels random; the shared palette is slick surfaces, soft interiors, and the slow crush between them.
The colleciton is all about hunger as theology, femininity as armor that cuts, desire as self-surgery, and politics as the body’s background radiation. Body dissolution equals loss of self, sure, but it also equals jailbreak. The anthology keeps asking who owns your flesh (church, state, lover, algorithm, addiction, you) and suggests the only honest answer is messy. The aftertaste is metal and perfume: a queasy high where shame flips to power without ever getting clean.
On the 2025 indie-horror shelf, this sits with the smarter, nastier anthologies that refuse “content warning as content.” As a statement of Filthy Loot’s house aesthetic, it’s a line in the sand: philosophy, not just provocation.
The collection turns body horror into a thinking person’s blood rite and nails the landing.
Read if you crave eros with your ichor, can handle graphic intimacy, love sentences that sweat.
Skip if you need moral handrails, hate second-person proximity to disordered eating, require neat cosmology.
BWAF Score: 8/10
TL;DR: A tight, grimy mixtape about flesh as philosophy and appetite as politics. If you want body horror that actually has ideas and still gets under your skin, this lands. If you’re chasing edge for edge’s sake, keep walking; this one wants your brain and your bile in the same bowl.
Filthy Loot’s BodyPunk comes preloaded with intent: an opening note draws a bright line between splatterpunk and “extreme,” arguing politics belongs to the former and philosophy to body horror. That frame sets expectations the book largely meets, with the lineup (Joe Koch, Max Restaino, Xavier Garcia, Charlene Elsby, Sam Richard) treating the body as thesis, experiment, and crime scene. It’s a volume that reads like a manifesto you can bleed on, and in the context of the press’s gnarlier catalog, it’s easily their most deliberate angle on embodied dread.
We’ve got five stories, five metastases. A young woman’s self-annihilating hunger meets a predatory intimacy in a restaurant bathroom (“And At Night, The Sirens”); a shut-in spirals through pain and perception (“Nothing Here”); desire and dissolution meet in crystalline vignettes; a post-op porn provocation dares you to confront gaze and gender; and a final cut stitches rage to ritual (“Endless Wound”). The common POV is a body on trial, and the stakes are identity versus appetite, control versus surrender, skin versus what leaks out.
What’s special here is how often the horror argues. Koch opens on a refrain – “It’s already happened. It’s happening again.” – that turns bulimia into ritual and seduction into metamorphosis, then detonates it with a bathroom encounter that is depraved, ecstatic, and strangely emancipatory. The scene’s sensory logic with bile as sacrament and spider-memory as origin myth makes the grotesque feel inevitable, not cheap. Later, Sam Richard’s closer weds pornography, geopolitics, and street-level nihilism, translating the splatterpunk claim that violence is political into cold, sticky imagery. Even when a piece aims to shock, it’s arguing about power.
Prose here swings from baroque to clipped. Koch’s sentences lilt and fever, stacking tactile verbs until the page feels wet; you can taste the porcelain and perfume. Restaino’s voice is intimate and migraine-bright, cutting boxes into a notebook while classic rock rots on the store speakers, then letting perception and space slide until you’re unsure which ache is real. Elsby’s contribution weaponizes bluntness and syntax, interrogating performance and post-op sexuality by refusing euphemism. Richard’s cadence is montage – loops of missiles, no-face men, ejaculate on film stock – like Godard found a snuff archive and started scoring it with helicopters. The variety never feels random; the shared palette is slick surfaces, soft interiors, and the slow crush between them.
The colleciton is all about hunger as theology, femininity as armor that cuts, desire as self-surgery, and politics as the body’s background radiation. Body dissolution equals loss of self, sure, but it also equals jailbreak. The anthology keeps asking who owns your flesh (church, state, lover, algorithm, addiction, you) and suggests the only honest answer is messy. The aftertaste is metal and perfume: a queasy high where shame flips to power without ever getting clean.
On the 2025 indie-horror shelf, this sits with the smarter, nastier anthologies that refuse “content warning as content.” As a statement of Filthy Loot’s house aesthetic, it’s a line in the sand: philosophy, not just provocation.
The collection turns body horror into a thinking person’s blood rite and nails the landing.
Read if you crave eros with your ichor, can handle graphic intimacy, love sentences that sweat.
Skip if you need moral handrails, hate second-person proximity to disordered eating, require neat cosmology.
February 15, 2026
1. And at Night, the Sirens by J. Koch
Joe Koch would have a personal quarrel with Stephen King. That is, Koch is overly interested in and focused on language and its ornateness, rather than telling the story.
Granted that I disliked the writing style, I actually thought the story was good. Now, was it a fit?
It's a mild body horror with almost no punk.
Score: 2.5/5 - OK
2. Nothing Here by Max Restaino
The story doesn't work; it's very uninteresting and simply a chore. You're counting minutes until this is over. Max could learn from the likes of L. Carrington how to tell more surreal stories.
It's a body horror, incredibly tiring to read, no interesting story, and no punk at all.
Score: 1.5 / 5 - Not Great
3. Like Snowflakes Melting on Your Tongue by Xavier Garcia
Now, this is probably the best story that delivers both body horror and punk. Garcia's style is punk, but it also touches on a few social issues and has some kind of a point (albeit vague).
Score: 3.75/5 - Good
4. Split Dick David's First Post Op Blowjob by Charlene Elsby
It kind of delivers on bodypunk themes, but it's not the most interesting story. It's good, don't get me wrong.
Score: 3/5
5. Endless Wound by Sam Richard
It's now the nth time I read Sam's work, and I see the same problem. He is more of a "Tell, don't Show" kind of writer. So his writing style could be condensed, fewer expositions, fewer monologues, more show. If he cut 30% of this story, it would've been better (saying this as an editor, too).
The story wasn't bad per se, and it's a body horror, but there is NO punk, or at least not enough.
Score: 2.5/5
Overall:
I'm disappointed, most stories are body horror, splatterpunk or punk whatsoever is absent.
I've never been disappointed by Filthy Loot before and thats a first.
Joe Koch would have a personal quarrel with Stephen King. That is, Koch is overly interested in and focused on language and its ornateness, rather than telling the story.
Granted that I disliked the writing style, I actually thought the story was good. Now, was it a fit?
It's a mild body horror with almost no punk.
Score: 2.5/5 - OK
2. Nothing Here by Max Restaino
The story doesn't work; it's very uninteresting and simply a chore. You're counting minutes until this is over. Max could learn from the likes of L. Carrington how to tell more surreal stories.
It's a body horror, incredibly tiring to read, no interesting story, and no punk at all.
Score: 1.5 / 5 - Not Great
3. Like Snowflakes Melting on Your Tongue by Xavier Garcia
Now, this is probably the best story that delivers both body horror and punk. Garcia's style is punk, but it also touches on a few social issues and has some kind of a point (albeit vague).
Score: 3.75/5 - Good
4. Split Dick David's First Post Op Blowjob by Charlene Elsby
It kind of delivers on bodypunk themes, but it's not the most interesting story. It's good, don't get me wrong.
Score: 3/5
5. Endless Wound by Sam Richard
It's now the nth time I read Sam's work, and I see the same problem. He is more of a "Tell, don't Show" kind of writer. So his writing style could be condensed, fewer expositions, fewer monologues, more show. If he cut 30% of this story, it would've been better (saying this as an editor, too).
The story wasn't bad per se, and it's a body horror, but there is NO punk, or at least not enough.
Score: 2.5/5
Overall:
I'm disappointed, most stories are body horror, splatterpunk or punk whatsoever is absent.
I've never been disappointed by Filthy Loot before and thats a first.
January 5, 2026
You got body horror in my splatterpunk.
You got splatterpunk in my body horror!
Together they taste like the clingy visceral drippings of a human ribcage slow-roasted over a beach bonfire of Judith Butler and Penthouse Forum.
Entrails include:
A tour de force opener from the inimitable Joe Koch examining the deleterious effects of disordered eating and the toxic politics of female pleasure; a well of long internalized self-loathing and shame bloodfountaining over into externalized rage.
A pinprickly cerebral dispatch from the madman Max Restaino that bores through the membranes between performance, dreams, and memory to excavate a pain so deep it demands a physical response - a living misery that begs to be put out of itself.
A spiraling, sprawling inner monologue from Xavier Garcia charting the mutative evolution of romantic love in a future crumbling beneath bioweaponized fallout.
A wickedly vindictive follow-up from dick-chopper extraordinaire Charlene Elsby, to what was already her dick-choppingest story to date; a stern, simple reminder (especially if your name is David) to keep it in your pants unless explicitly requested to do otherwise.
And a virtuoso closer from Sam Richard, connecting the razor thin lines between body art and self-harm, and the universal impulse to memorialize agonic loss - to make of ourselves a memorial - for fear of losing even more lest we let ourselves forget.
Great stuff, as always, from the indispensable Filthy Loot.
You got splatterpunk in my body horror!
Together they taste like the clingy visceral drippings of a human ribcage slow-roasted over a beach bonfire of Judith Butler and Penthouse Forum.
Entrails include:
A tour de force opener from the inimitable Joe Koch examining the deleterious effects of disordered eating and the toxic politics of female pleasure; a well of long internalized self-loathing and shame bloodfountaining over into externalized rage.
A pinprickly cerebral dispatch from the madman Max Restaino that bores through the membranes between performance, dreams, and memory to excavate a pain so deep it demands a physical response - a living misery that begs to be put out of itself.
A spiraling, sprawling inner monologue from Xavier Garcia charting the mutative evolution of romantic love in a future crumbling beneath bioweaponized fallout.
A wickedly vindictive follow-up from dick-chopper extraordinaire Charlene Elsby, to what was already her dick-choppingest story to date; a stern, simple reminder (especially if your name is David) to keep it in your pants unless explicitly requested to do otherwise.
And a virtuoso closer from Sam Richard, connecting the razor thin lines between body art and self-harm, and the universal impulse to memorialize agonic loss - to make of ourselves a memorial - for fear of losing even more lest we let ourselves forget.
Great stuff, as always, from the indispensable Filthy Loot.
October 28, 2025
An anthology of literary body horror meets splatterpunk (hence the title) that’ll send shivers up and down your worthless flesh.
We start with an editors note talking about the debate of extreme horror vs splatterpunk. They mention how many consider SP “political” and EH not so much. I can get with that - but I also find (and I’m no expert) that SP violence is often a bit more - fun? Less consequential? Gross for gross sakes? Typically they’ll rip apart a character we didn’t develop much with, sure, some political ish undertone as to WHY but with EH, we usually give a crap before they are destroyed in often a mean spirited way.
All of that is to say that if “political” is your SP stance - there is definitely that in this short book - but the BODY HORROR (not necessarily EH) of it all - that reigned supreme for me.
The final two stories by Richard and Elsby, in particular, had me feeling my gut/torso and down lower (get your head out of the gutter) to make sure I hadn’t had the damage down that these masters of the genre depict in their tales.
That - is where body horror earns and stays. If it can make you FEEL the horrid thing they are putting on the page in your own cells - that - is success in genre and that happened several times over this hundred or so pages.
Congrats to Filthy Loot on another sick collection. (Again, the art and format rule, for the record)
We start with an editors note talking about the debate of extreme horror vs splatterpunk. They mention how many consider SP “political” and EH not so much. I can get with that - but I also find (and I’m no expert) that SP violence is often a bit more - fun? Less consequential? Gross for gross sakes? Typically they’ll rip apart a character we didn’t develop much with, sure, some political ish undertone as to WHY but with EH, we usually give a crap before they are destroyed in often a mean spirited way.
All of that is to say that if “political” is your SP stance - there is definitely that in this short book - but the BODY HORROR (not necessarily EH) of it all - that reigned supreme for me.
The final two stories by Richard and Elsby, in particular, had me feeling my gut/torso and down lower (get your head out of the gutter) to make sure I hadn’t had the damage down that these masters of the genre depict in their tales.
That - is where body horror earns and stays. If it can make you FEEL the horrid thing they are putting on the page in your own cells - that - is success in genre and that happened several times over this hundred or so pages.
Congrats to Filthy Loot on another sick collection. (Again, the art and format rule, for the record)
June 4, 2025
at this point, in my humble opinion, anything filthy loot publishes I’m going to read (i may miss a release here and there) this was a really solid, eloquent collection of stories that weren’t overly grotesque and are done with delicacy and taste.
November 15, 2025
couple tales of body horror, don’t read while eating. made that mistake hehe.
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